US
Presidents Must be Prosecuted for Military Aggressions, War
CrimesBy David Swanson

April
309, 2013 "Information
Clearing House" -"PTV"
-
"Our intelligence community does assess with varying degrees
of confidence that the Syrian regime has used chemical
weapons on a small scale in Syria, specifically the chemical
agent sarin."

I do
assess with varying degrees of horror (some of the varying
degrees rather high even) that a lot of people are going to
die. And how dare they die from chemical weapons when they
should be dying from hellfire missiles and cluster bombs and
napalm and depleted uranium and white phosphorous. We have
a responsibility to protect these people from dying of the
wrong type of weapon and in too small numbers.

I'm in
Dallas protesting the rehabilitation of our last criminal
president because of the precedents he set for our current
criminal president. So, precedents are on my mind. One
precedent for an illegal humanitarian NATO war on Syria is,
of course, the illegal humanitarian war on Libya two years
ago. And the pair of precedents (Libya and Syria) will put
the target of the neocon/neoliberal cooperative war project
squarely on Iran.

Syria
will suffer, of course. There will be no more an example of
a humanitarian war that actually benefitted humanity after
Syria than before. The precedent will not be one of having
accomplished something, but of having gotten away with
something.

For some truly illuminating background on what was done to
Libya, and some relevant discussion of what awaits Syria (if
we don't prevent it), I recommend Francis Boyle's new book,
Destroying Libya and World Order.

Boyle
served as a lawyer for the government of Libya repeatedly,
over a period of decades, more than once successfully
preventing a military assault by the United States and the
United Kingdom. Boyle details the aggression toward Libya
of the Reagan administration: the lies and false
accusations, the sanctions, the provocations, the
assassination attempts, the infiltration, the blatant
disregard for international law.

Boyle's history brings us up to and through the 2011
assault, and traces its precedents to a very similar war
over a decade earlier in Bosnia. Boyle finds the
unconstitutional and illegal assault on Libya a clear
impeachable offense for President Obama. And why would we
think otherwise? Only because we let Clinton and Bush get
away with everything they got away with. It would seem
unfair now to impeach Obama for a crime his predecessors
committed as well.

But
past, as well as current, presidents can be impeached,
censured, prosecuted, and/or publicly shamed. Five of them
came to Dallas today; there shouldn't be any trouble finding
them. And the criminal attack on Libya can be treated as
the crime it was. The excuse of protection was used to
quite openly pursue the overthrow of a nation's government,
bombing large numbers of civilians in the process, while
arming brutal thugs and creating predictable blowback in
neighboring nations as well.

In
contrast, in Bahrain, nonviolent pro-democracy activists are
left to their own devices as a U.S.-backed dictatorship
jails, tortures, and murders them.

In
Syria, the United States has worked against peace and for
violence. That violence is not a justification for further
and heightened violence. And every member of an
intelligence "community" that announces that Syria might
possibly have used a chemical weapon should be doing
community service for the people of Fallujah and Basra and
Baghdad, not prodding the world's only stupor power into
another genocide.

We ask readers to play a proactive role and click
the "Report link [at the base of each comment] when
in your opinion, comments cross the line and become
purely offensive, racist or disrespectful to others.

In accordance
with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material
is distributed without profit to those who have
expressed a prior interest in receiving the
included information for research and educational
purposes. Information Clearing House has no
affiliation whatsoever with the originator of
this article nor is Information ClearingHouse
endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)